Vamos Automotive Simulator

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Vamos Automotive Simulator is an open source and completely free graphical software implemented in C++/Python and designed from the offset to act as an automotive simulation framework for GNU/Linux operating systems. It can be used mostly for thorough physical modeling.

Can be used to model a car’s major systems

In other words, with this software you will be able to model a car’s major systems, including simulation of the engine, transmission, limited-slip differential, and clutch. The application includes a first-person, real-time 3D driving software.

Vamos can also be used to model suspension and tires. The application has been engineered in such a way that it can avoid cyclic dependencies. Another interesting feature is that it uses vectors, maps and strings instead of arrays.

Getting started with Vamos Automotive Simulator

For your convenience, the program is distributed as both a pre-built binary for 64-bit systems and a universal source archive. However, it is quite difficult to use the pre-built binary, as you will have to manually copy the files contained in the archive to their respective locations on your root filesystem.

So, the best way to install Vamos is by using the source archive, which can be downloaded for free from Softpedia. Save the archive on a location of your choice, extract its contents, open a terminal emulator, move to the location of the extracted archive files (e.g cd /home/softpedia/vamos-0.8.2) and run the ‘./configure && make && sudo make install’ command.

After installation, run the 'vamos.py' command in the terminal emulator to use the application.

Under the hood

Taking a look under the hood of the Vamos Automotive Simulator project, we can notice that while its libraries are written in the C++ programming language, the game is written in the Python programming language.

Vamos requires the Boost, OpenAL and OpenGL libraries, including GLUT and glu, to work. It has been successfully tested with 32-bit and 64-bit flavors of various Linux kernel-based operating systems.